Go Fish

In the 60s Paul Newman classic, Cool Hand Luke, “the Captain” savagely beats the story’s hero, Luke Jackson, after he is caught trying to escape the southern work camp where he is serving time. “What we have here is a failure to communicate,” announces the Captain to Luke’s fellow detainees after his violent anger cools. None of the inmates mistake his meaning.

Robert Mueller could have prefaced his 10-minute statement yesterday with the same memorable Hollywood line. Yet and still, despite its omission we should be just as clear as George Kennedy and company to his meaning. There never was a “Mueller Time,” merely a Mueller Report. Exhaustively researched, carefully worded… a 448-page collection of facts, which provide a solid basis for Congressional action – not Special Counsel action, or DOJ action, but Congressional Action.

On a personal level Mueller’s words were a blunt announcement that he is no super hero, and after two years of very thankless work, is instead a tired 72-year old who wants his life back. But on a broader, more theoretical level, the now former Special Counsel, made clear the helpless inanity of the idea a moron like Donald Trump should have more than 200 years of American democracy depending on superpower intervention. Everything we need to deal with the current pestilence is available. Just do your jobs… I’ve done mine.

Meanwhile, it should not be lost Mueller cleared up a couple of critical points for the record. First, if there remains any doubt, the President is either lying or inexcusably misinformed when he blathers there was no Russian collusion. Not only was their collusion, but it was surely directed by the Kremlin. Next, despite the assumption by near everybody else in the US, Mueller from the beginning never accepted it as his responsibility to even consider indicting Trump. That he would allow such a fundamental miscommunication to percolate all this time without making public remarks to address it is inexplicable and perhaps unforgivable, but he clearly corrected it yesterday.

By making it clear he never felt it his purview to charge Trump, Mueller laid Attorney General Bill Barr bare as a perjurer. Barr asserted under oath Mueller told him his motivation not to charge the President was influenced by more than merely Mueller’s understanding of his office’s limitations, clearly implying the Special Counsel would have permitted more damning evidence to override his fidelity to how he believed the law and constitution limited his role. Yesterday, Mueller was crystal clear on this point… he would not have allowed that. Barr was lying to Congress.

Finally, Mueller, ever the literary tactician used one word to convey his feelings about whether Trump’s malfeasance requires intervention. In addition to forcefully stating “if we had had confidence the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” he employed the word “when” instead of “if” in describing a pressing need to bring the hammer down when “… a subject of an investigation obstructs that investigation or lies to investigators…” There can be no doubt who he was referring to, or whether he believes it a major matter requiring additional institutional oversight. And if anybody wasn’t clear enough on the level of gravity Mueller accorded the entire assault on US democracy he spent two years investigating, he finished his statement with an exclamation point that “all Americans” should heed.

So moving forward Congress can either accept Mueller’s baton or flinch and let it fall away. Two and a half years in there really isn’t a plan B to impeachment. Trump is holding this country hostage, mollifying him until next November to presumably rout him at the polls and wait to see what crisis he will create on his way out doesn’t sound attractive. New initiatives like slapping Mexico with tariffs because they aren’t meeting the President’s criteria for blocking immigration to the north, and mindless saber rattling at Iran, which could start a stream of events the Administration loses control of, reminds us Trump is an aggressive and unpredictable cancer. Waiting him out is flat out dangerous to both us and the planet.

Republican adults are beginning to emerge from their untimely slumber. Just today former Maine Senator and Defense Secretary William Cohen offered an op-ed piece calling for impeachment. Cohen, who as one of a handful of GOP members of Congress who joined Democrats in calling for Nixon’s head, knows a bit about going against the grain. He pointed out that most of the country initially opposed impeaching Nixon, but came around as facts came to light. Mueller has produced 448 pages of them; his statement yesterday clearly urged the Democrats to take them out for a test drive and see what they can do. Trump in the Senate dock creates a platform he can’t interrupt, and events he and his poodle Barr can’t preempt and redefine.

In the fall of 2016 many of us, too overconfident in Clinton’s chances, scoffed that if the US electorate was idiotic enough to elect a reality show nihilist, the nation deserved the cataclysm it would surely receive. Now we know just how ugly and existentially perilous a Trump regime is. We also know his wretched core of die hard support tops out at just under 40 percent. Allowing the fear of alienating those with their hands covering their ears to forestall holding US history’s most corrupt and seditiously incompetent President to account amounts to throwing in the towel and accepting the dive to the bottom he represents. We must be better than that. Yesterday, Robert Mueller challenged us to stop cutting bait and get some lines in the water. Heed his call. BC